This is a joint project between the University of Pennsylvania (Prof. Roch Guerin), the University of Minnesota (Prof. Zhi-Li Zhang), and the University of Massachusetts (Prof. Lixin Gao) funded by NSF under the FIND initiative -NSF grants CNS-0627004 (Penn), CNS-0626617 (UMN), CNS-0626808 (UMass) .

The project addresses fundamental questions on building manageability into routing systems for future Internet architectures. This targets both designing routing systems with manageability in mind in the first place, and extending or modifying existing routing protocols to improve their manageability.

Additionally, the project seeks to explore how to lessen the “real-time” manageability requirements of routing systems.In other words, manageability is not an end-goal in itself, and is only a means to solving problems associated with routing’s inability to deal with certain disruptions.Hence, another alternative is to make routing more resilient to common disruptions to avoid the need for rapid management reactions that are both a source of complexity and often responsible for instabilities.

Ideally, we want routing systems that either manage themselves or don’t need management oversight, at least not as part of real-time operations.